Thomas Johnson was well on his way to being a star receiver for the Aggies when he walked off the Texas A&M campus less than three months into his freshman year.

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2012 File Photo
-
Vernon Bryant
)

Robert Johnson said of his son, Thomas, “I don’t know the power of this voice in his head, but I know it makes him run.”

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Robert Johnson
)

Dave and Lisa Stephenson have a history of helping South Dallas football players. After Johnson’s arrest in 2014, they devised a plan in which he would live with them in Farmersville while he got help.

(
Stephenson family
- Dave and Lisa Stephenson)

David Stevens was jogging on White Rock Lake trail on Monday when he ran into Thomas Johnson at the height of his madness.

(Photo courtesy of Stevens family -
Stevens family
)

Thomas Johnson wasn’t just a star athlete for Skyline, but also the class clown who dressed sharp and carried a Bible wherever he went.

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2011 File Photo
-
Vernon Bryant
)

Thomas Johnson talked with Henry Campbell, a lawyer who had been his mentor in high school, after his arrest in Waco in 2014.

(
Stephenson family
- Dave and Lisa Stephenson)

Thomas Johnson disappeared from Texas A&M University after 10 games of glory, before the extraordinary feats of his body became bound to the disease in his brain.

Thousands once watched the wide receiver’s feet leave the ground at the sideline, one arm raised like a blade as a pass flew straight into his hand. He seemed destined for greater heights still.

It took three years from that leaping catch for Johnson to complete his descent. He abruptly walked off the A&M campus less than three months into his freshman year, heading into a string of bizarre journeys, biblical delusions and escalating arrests.

From his broken family and the homes of wealthy benefactors, many tried to pull the athlete from his spiral. But even those who love Johnson believe the police reports from Monday:

That the same hand that caught a future NFL quarterback’s pass in the fall of 2012 came down from the air with a machete in it, landing in the neck of a stranger who met Johnson along White Rock Creek Trail, at the height of his madness.

Football dreams

“I don’t know the power of this voice in his head, but I know it makes him run,” Robert Johnson said from his apartment last week, miles from the jail cell where his son awaits a murder charge. “It makes him walk in the middle of the night. It makes him put on a winter coat in the middle of the summer.”

A framed photo on the end table showed his son as a boy, mid-air in a long jump, many years before the trouble began.

Thomas Johnson was born from a mid-’90s fling between Robert, a truck driver, and a woman he barely knewnamed Linda Hanks.

Growing up with his mother in a tiny, wood-frame house in South Dallas, Johnson always wanted to play football. It soon became obvious that he could.

By age 9, he was a long-jump champion. That’s when he caught the eye of Ted Ehrhardt, a wealthy business owner who recruited the boy for his youth football team.

Ehrhardt was struck not only by Johnson’s talent, but by his quiet modesty. “He never loved being the best player on the field,” he said. “It was never about himself.”

To make football games in the morning, Johnson started spending the night at the Ehrhardts’ house on a tree-filled acre in Arlington. His visits became more and more frequent —until after a year or two he simply moved in with the family.

A new family

Johnson vacationed with the Ehrhardts, and their son Mitchell even started calling him brother — his best friend, well-mannered but always up for a dare.

“He had to go to the end of the driveway, get in his boxers and wave at everyone going by,” Mitchell recalled. “He smiled the whole time. That was the kind of guy he was.”

The Ehrhardts also enrolled Johnson in Oakridge, a private school in Arlington where he shared the football field with players like Tayo Fabuluje, now with the Chicago Bears, and Ross Apo, who attended the Seattle Seahawks minicamp this year.

“He was ridiculously fast,” said Apo. “He was by far the best athlete I’ve played with in any sport.”

The Ehrhardts essentially parented Johnson for several years. And then, abruptly in the summer before 11th grade, the boy’s mother pulled him back to Oak Cliff.

Grand plans

Johnson’s mother hung up on a reporter three times last week. Many who knew her suspected she was unstable, even before her son turned strange.

“She has a lot of problems,” said Henry Campbell, a lawyer who helped with the football program at Skyline High when Johnson transferred there — eventually becoming the boy’s mentor. “Her life revolved around Thomas. She talks in this grandeur style of what Thomas is going to do.”

But returning to his old house in Oak Cliff didn’t seem to slow his football career. He quickly became a star at Skyline, sought by universities in his senior year.

Johnson sweated and breathed deep before the TV cameras in the cafeteria on the day he announced his choice. He set three caps on top of the podium, for Oregon, California and Texas Christian University — the third school closest to home and his mother’s favorite.

Then, in a flash of showmanship, Johnson pulled out an A&M cap and fit it on his head. Coaches and classmates cheered, but there was a problem: The cameras weren’t rolling.

Johnson performed the hat trick again minutes later. It didn’t feel quite the same.

Troubles at A&M

“Something happened from the time he walked onto Texas A&M to the time he stepped foot off that campus,” said Terance Perine, whose son Johnson had mentored in high school.

Johnson had been beloved at Skyline: the class clown and star athlete who dressed sharp and carried a Bible wherever he went. He never lacked for friends or girlfriends.

But the summer he left for college, strange stories started floating back to Dallas: That Johnson had stopped getting haircuts and would not leave his room. That he would wear only white clothing. That his faith had morphed into religious delusions.

Perine recalled visiting Johnson after helping trounce the University of Arkansas. He said the teen looked oddly scruffy. “I could tell something wasn’t right.”

He wasn’t the only one.

CatchVideo

“He wouldn’t speak with teammates or coaches unless they had biblical names,” said Campbell, who stayed in touch with many of Johnson’s friends.

The lawyer once heard that Johnson had fled from a basketball game after the crowd jerked up their thumbs to make the Aggies’ famous “gig ’em” sign.

“He thought they were Illuminati,” Campbell said.

And yet the freshman stayed in top form on the field: the team’s third-leading receiver as he played against some of the most vaunted defenses in college football.

His famous one-handed catch in September came in a narrow loss to Florida. But two months later, he made three key catches that helped his team topple No. 1-ranked Alabama.

He flew back to College Station from that game, and disappeared from campus less than two days later.

Losing track

It took three days to find Johnson. A&M even sent police to Dallas to help, and news stories spread of the star gone missing.

Police found him about 3 a.m. on Nov. 15, 2012, on a street near Skyline High. He had walked at least 26 miles of the journey home.

Johnson’s mother brought him into Campbell’s law office for help.

“He looked healthy,” Campbell said, but it was obvious to him that something was wrong.

He questioned Johnson about the tales from A&M, including a rumor that a teammate had done something humiliating and traumatizing to Johnson.

Johnson stayed quiet, as he often did.

But while offering no good explanation for leaving, he seemed open to returning to A&M. His father said coaches there wanted to help him.

Johnson and Campbell started making plans for counseling. But then the mentor lost track of the teen — an increasingly common problem over the next three years.

Odd behavior

Johnson came to Perine’s house for dinner one night in late 2012 and rarely left it for the next four months.

“He didn’t have any drive,” Perine said. “It was hard to get him to take a shower, to brush his teeth.”

After a workout one evening, Johnson started chuckling for no reason.

“What’s so funny?” Perine asked.

“Nothing,” came the reply. And then: “I’m going to tell you something and you can’t tell anybody. I’m the messiah. I’m the chosen one.”

Perine indulged his young friend’s behavior, afraid he’d run away if asked about it. The chuckling continued.

Campbell said he was called to Skyline High one night in the spring of 2013. Johnson had broken into the locker room.

The lawyer and coaches worked to keep him out of jail, but Johnson disappeared again soon after.

When he popped up on a police scanner again a year later, he would need serious help.

Getting help

After a scrimmage in the spring of 2014, one of Johnson’s coaches from Skyline pulled a man named Dave Stephenson to the sideline.

Stephenson and his wife had spent a decade helping South Dallas football players — offering the kids everything from Gatorade to extended stays in their home. The coach explained that Johnson was sitting in a jail cell outside Waco, after stealing his aunt’s van and trying to drive it back to A&M.

“He simply said, ‘He’s lost his way and he’s not sure where to go,’” Stephenson recalled.

The couple met Johnson after he was transferred to the Dallas County jail, crowding into a plexiglass booth to talk about his future. He seemed normal to the couple — soft spoken and eager to get his life back on track. They had not heard all the stories from A&M and afterwards.

With the court’s blessing, the Stephensons devised a plan in which Johnson would live with them on four acres in Farmersville — with his own bedroom and a long list of rules and appointments to keep.

If he followed the rules for several months, his aunt agreed to drop the charges against him. The plan worked well — at first.

Johnson became part of the Stephensons’ family, helping them cook dinner and reminiscing about childhood vacations with the Ehrhardts — never speaking of A&M or his mother.

“The first word that pops into my head is ‘gentle,’” Lisa Stephenson said. Neither she nor her husband ever worried about sharing a home with him.

But they noticed odd behavior. Johnson would be effusive one moment — giving out spontaneous hugs — and then “go vacant,” lowering his head and twirling his hair in silence.

“We’d try to figure out, what did we say that triggered it?” Lisa Stephenson said. One evening, she got an inkling.

The makeshift family was sitting in the living room in the summer of 2014, watching The Avengers, when Dave Stephenson’s phone rang.

It was Johnson’s mother. Their guest took the phone to the back porch and returned a few minutes later.

“His complete countenance changed,” Lisa Stephenson said. “He went from being a normal person to retreating, and then almost being on a mission.”

As he had told the Ehrhardts years earlier, Johnson insisted his mother needed him back. “He literally said, ‘You can’t make me stay. If you won’t take me, I’ll walk,’” Lisa Stephenson said.

The Stephensons drove Johnson to his mother’s house for one night. He promised to meet the couple at a Starbucks the next day and return. They never saw him again, and his mother would not take their calls.

“When he walked away from our house, we realized his ability to go back to a four-year college or play in the NFL was gone,” Dave Stephenson said.

But he didn’t realize how far Johnson had left to fall.

Spiraling down

What's known of Johnson’s path after he left the Stephensons’ house is spotty. He seems to have popped up almost at random at the homes of friends and relatives in the last year.

Police chased him from his 9- or 10-year-old cousin’s house last August. Johnson believed the boy was a messenger from God.

He babbled often about Bible characters and came to believe in a talking teddy bear.

At some point in the last year,a relativehad Johnson diagnosed with schizophrenia. His friends heard talk of a treatment program in Lancaster, though it’s unclear if he ever went.

Johnson showed up at his father’s apartment in Hurst the week before last. He often watched football on his dad’s couch but, that day, paced the parking lot, spooking Robert Johnson’s neighbors.

After arguing with his father outside the apartment, Johnson began walking back toward Dallas, 30 miles away.

“If I could’ve just kept him here, maybe it would have made a difference,” Robert Johnson said, rubbing tears from his face. “I feel like it would have. I wish I just could have.”

Johnson surfaced for the last time on Monday, not long after sunrise.

The attack

A jogger named David Stevens started out on his regular route along White Rock Creek that morning. A cyclist spotted him about 8 a.m.: face down along the trail beneath a bridge, beside a man who stood in a wood chopper’s stance, hacking at Stevens’ neck.

The killer planted his shoes in the dirt and lifted the machete high in the air before slamming it down. The bicyclist heard the weapon's impact at least six times before he cleared the bridge, screaming at anyone he met to run the other way.

Police say Johnson wandered through the park after killing Stevens, searching for a phone so he could call 911. Then witnesses saw him walk back to the body, waiting calmly until the officers arrived.

Johnson called the machete a sword, police say, and he tried to explain to them: “It’s like when you don’t wake up.”

The reaction

The killing sounded like the end of a horror movie to many. But those who knew Johnson as a class clown, or kin, or a gentle, damaged house guest had different reactions.

His mother sobbed. His father vowed to help fight against mental illness.

Friends who had never seen him so much as throw a punch wondered how he could do it. Perine called himself “an accessory to murder” — along with everyone else who failed to help Johnson.

Texas A&M released a statement saying, “We are not able to discuss this situation due to legal proceedings, but this is an awful tragedy for all involved.”

On Thursday, the night before Dave Stephenson mailed a letter of sympathy to the dead man’s wife, he visited the Dallas County jail where he had first met Johnson.

The Stephensons ran into the Ehrhardts on the elevator ride up the tower, and the two families traded stories of their guest in happier times.

On the other side of a plexiglass window, Stephenson thought Johnson looked almost normal again — “at peace” — much as he had a year earlier, when he walked out of jail with a plan to repair his life.

But Stephenson has no illusions this time. He promised to do everything he can for his friend’smind and soul.